Cleaning the Burnpot on a Hot Stove

I'm assuming it's not officially recommended to open the stove and scrape the burnpot when it's still hot, but is this a common practice for people who don't want to shut down for any length of time in the dead of winter?

My shutdown period (fans still running) usually allows for plenty of time for the stove to cool down. House cools down a couple degrees during the half hour plus cleaning but no biggie on Saturday when I should be doing all my chores and keeping warm anyway.

I would just turn my bige to low for about 5 minutes to burn out some of the pellets and do a quick swipe with the supplied tool. Really just kind of scraped under the fire to clean the air holes out some. I couldn't drag too much out of the burnpot or it would go out on me. Closed the door and move the heat back up. I did it once a day and I could then go all week before I had to shutdown to clean. This was with Turmans and Spruce Pointes which are realy clean burning. Shoulders I was using Premier Appl hardwoods(similar to SC) which were a bit more ashy. I did the pot scrape 2x a day with them. In the AM before I headed out to work and just after dinner.

I only scrape when i shut down to clean. Don't need to do it any more frequent than that.... i rarely have any build up on the burn pot.

I generally turn it off after breakfast on a saturday. go do chores/etc. by noon time, im back and its cool and i clean it before lunch. turn it back on before the sun goes away.

These would probably be quite helpful when cleanig a hot burnpot.

http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/th...r,-handy-man's-edition/ID=prod6146733-product

I use adjustable angled pliers to lift the hot pot out of its receptacle so I can scrape out the crud with it still inside the firebox, then it gets dumped before it comes out onto the stone hearth pad for a real scraping.

I can go from turn stove off to stove on and convection blower running in 40 minutes.

I scrape the Harman every 3 days. Open the door, remove the ash in front of the pot, scrape real good, shut the door and continue enjoying the flame.

My goal is to scrape/clean the burnpot daily since my stove runs much better that way, and clean it fully only once a week. Tonight was a trial run to see how quick I could do it with minimal down time. What I decided to do was turn the stove off and wait a few minutes for the active fire to go out. I then opened the door and quickly scraped the burnpot onto the floor of the stove, closed the door and restarted it. This method worked well and caused less than 10 minutes of down time. The only negative I can see from turning the stove off is that it needs to go through the ignition/start up phase but I don't think I can avoid this because I really need to scrape the burnpot clean for best results.

I'd love to be able to scrape without shutting down but my stove is older and I don't think it's designed to do that. Comments?

Not sure about your stove, but I'm supposed to do that with mine. I would think that scraping while hot wouldn't hurt it any. I think...

I scrape the ash out of mine twice a day no matter what setting it's on. Open the door, wait a couple of seconds for the flame to be sucked back in, scrape out the ash, close the door. Less than 10 seconds.

what the heck is this pot scraping you all talking about ?

It is a daily occurrence with a number of stoves.

I do my pot scrape out once a week when I clean my stove, so now you know how long my cleaning session takes from start of shutdown to finish and back to heat pouring out of the stove again.

Aren't you the guy that was complaining about bees nests growing in his stove?

Heh it wasnt the stove, it was MWP and my fault for not changing the setting

You need to buy a Harman. You wouldn't have to worry about putting it on the right setting to get it to burn right.

all this talk about pot scraping up to twice a day gives me 2nd thoughts on installing the empress

I only do a scraping when I clean my stove why the rest have to do it once a day is a mystery to me.

Just for the record, I don't have to scrape to pot. In fact, I almost think I get more heat out of the stove with a bed of ash in front of the fire. I just like the way the stove burns better with the ash scraped out.

Breckwells problem is a tiny burnpot design. The older units were larger and didn't need a daily swish. But since breckwell redesigned it(more of a cost saver with less material IMHO). the new pot has so little surface area(which contains the air passages) you need to do this pretty much daily.

Maybe a Binford Big Air Model 9999 combustion blower upgrade kit would take care of that issue ?

I do it all the time with stove running.

So thats the model you stuffed in yours! Bout time you shared with the group!

I have the older model Breckwell with the bigger burnpot. After about 24 hrs, the burnpot really needs to be cleaned or it fills up and doesn't burn nearly as well. I will upgrade the stove eventually, but I can't really complain since I bought it last year on CL for $500 (including the chimney liner) and it burns pretty darn well as long as I keep it clean.

I use the Subsailor method. Unless the pellets are crap and there's a huge ash dam there, I doubt it even makes a difference.

It's an OCD thing for us Harman owners I think.

I always had this suspicion about you Harman folk.